The sanctuary around Het Nut on Utrecht's Berlinplein is becoming more unique by the day. This is mainly due to the building projects around it. Once it was a colourful oasis in barren wasteland. Now the little land is almost completely enclosed by flat blocks. So it is striking how unique it is that that plot in that expensive location is stillMauerpark, the sanctuary that appeared in Berlin where The Wall had left its most fraught footprint.
Here, right next to the tunnel into which the A2 disappeared, the land is worth many millions in real estate, so it is nice that the Utrecht city council has kept it out of the hands of property developers so that there is still a place where artistic freedom offers local residents the prospect of a different life. On Wednesday 2 July, the day with weather records we would rather not think about, Greg Nottrots company Het Nut showed perfectly why they belong there and not in a dune hollow on any Wadden Island.
Dream dome
The Utrecht company around this unique theatre-maker is playing a double bill of performances it brought to Oerol last month. Performances that were sequels to previous work by Het Nut, which focused on visionary conversation rather than theatrical imagination.
In 'Promise Makes Guilt', with which the evening opened on this Wednesday, Nottrot says sorry to Martin Rombouts, the frontman of The Literary Boyband who has to deal with his status as a fresh BN'er since he won De Slimste Mens.
That 'sorry' from Nottrot is about the fat ton he raked in with the performance Good Gold Money, in which he promised to use "surplus capital" from the public to build a "dome" on a pond in Hee on Terschelling. As the target amount of 250,000 euros was not reached, the Dome did not come and Het Nut spent the money on other things. Including, therefore, this performance in which Nottrot says sorry to Rombouts, who always wondered how real that idea of Greg's was.
Downpour
Of course, that Dome on the mudflats was just an occasion: the true work of art was the question of that excess capital and whether you could save the world with it. Rombouts, the realist, and Nottrot, the dreamer, met with difficulty, and providence provided a beautiful, concluding downpour, which was gratefully greeted by all.
What was even better, this evening, was the setting. For how fitting that that ever-shrinking little free port in that ever-rich Berlin Square should be the venue for an evening about idealism and big business!
In the second part of the evening, we are in The Capitalists, where audiences and a loose band of writers, actors and performers interact to discuss whether it is possible to have laws that make the world a fairer place. In a summer dune hollow, such a question seems mostly the occasion for dreamy musings. Here, among the concrete, the conversation is hyperactive.
Grandiose theatre
While in The Hague, the political elite chose to criminalise compassion, panic struck on Berlin Square, because the articulate audience was sometimes very clever. It eventually resulted in grandiose theatre, with delightful improvisations by Elvis de Launay and Mark Kraan, pleasantly alienating electro rock by Frank Van Kasteren and Demira Jansen, a beautiful vulnerable song by Marcel Osterop and finally a grandiose solo by Mark Kraan, which immediately builds a bridge to the performance on the devastating debt industry to be seen later this year (Drapery - The point - New Utrecht Theatre).
Glorious pivot in all this remains Greg Nottrot, who this time reminded me strongly not only in appearance but also in acting of the character Carmy in the hit series The Bear, about a chef who transforms a snack bar into a stellar restaurant, at great expense. Nottrot remains that theatrical booth worker who uses his natural talent for making people dream so relentlessly that you sometimes worry about his health. Fortunately, there is that little plot of greenery with tin structures where you find peace on the roof of the busiest highway in the country. Saves a ferry to dreamland.
